NPM License Checker
As of v17.0.0 the failOn and onlyAllow arguments take semicolons as delimeters instead of commas. Some license names contain commas and it messed with the parsing
Ever needed to see all the license info for a module and its dependencies?
It's this easy:
npm install -g license-checker
mkdir foo
cd foo
npm install yui-lint
license-checker
You should see something like this:
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: http://github.com/chriso/cli
│ └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-glob
│ └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-graceful-fs
│ └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/inherits
│ └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
├─ [email protected]
│ └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-lru-cache
│ └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-lru-cache
│ └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch
│ └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch
│ └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/sigmund
│ └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
└─ [email protected]
├─ licenses: BSD
└─ repository: http://github.com/yui/yui-lint
An asterisk next to a license name means that it was deduced from an other file than package.json (README, LICENSE, COPYING, ...) You could see something like this:
└─ [email protected]
├─ repository: https://github.com/visionmedia/debug
└─ licenses: MIT*
Options
--productiononly show production dependencies.--developmentonly show development dependencies.--start [path of the initial json to look for]--unknownreport guessed licenses as unknown licenses.--onlyunknownonly list packages with unknown or guessed licenses.--jsonoutput in json format.--csvoutput in csv format.--csvComponentPrefixprefix column for component in csv format.--out [filepath]write the data to a specific file.--customPathto add a custom Format file in JSON--exclude [list]exclude modules which licenses are in the comma-separated list from the output--relativeLicensePathoutput the location of the license files as relative paths--summaryoutput a summary of the license usage',--failOn [list]fail (exit with code 1) on the first occurrence of the licenses of the semicolon-separated list--onlyAllow [list]fail (exit with code 1) on the first occurrence of the licenses not in the semicolon-seperated list--packages [list]restrict output to the packages (package@version) in the semicolon-seperated list--excludePackages [list]restrict output to the packages (package@version) not in the semicolon-seperated list--excludePrivatePackagesrestrict output to not include any package marked as private--direct look for direct dependencies only
Exclusions
A list of licenses is the simplest way to describe what you want to exclude.
You can use valid SPDX identifiers. You can use valid SPDX expressions like MIT OR X11. You can use non-valid SPDX identifiers, like Public Domain, since npm does support some license strings that are not SPDX identifiers.
Examples
license-checker --json > /path/to/licenses.json
license-checker --csv --out /path/to/licenses.csv
license-checker --unknown
license-checker --customPath customFormatExample.json
license-checker --exclude 'MIT, MIT OR X11, BSD, ISC'
license-checker --packages '[email protected];[email protected];[email protected]'
license-checker --excludePackages 'internal-1;internal-2'
license-checker --onlyunknown
Custom format
The --customPath option can be used with CSV to specify the columns. Note that the first column, module_name, will always be used.
When used with JSON format, it will add the specified items to the usual ones.
The available items are the following:
- name
- version
- description
- repository
- publisher
- url
- licenses
- licenseFile
- licenseText
- licenseModified
You can also give default values for each item. See an example in customFormatExample.json.
Requiring
var checker = require('license-checker');
checker.init({
start: '/path/to/start/looking'
}, function(err, packages) {
if (err) {
//Handle error
} else {
//The sorted package data
//as an Object
}
});
Debugging
license-checker uses debug for internal logging. There’s two internal markers:
license-checker:errorfor errorslicense-checker:logfor non-errors
Set the DEBUG environment variable to one of these to see debug output:
$ export DEBUG=license-checker*; license-checker
scanning ./yui-lint
├─ [email protected]
│ ├─ repository: http://github.com/chriso/cli
│ └─ licenses: MIT
# ...
How Licenses are Found
We walk through the node_modules directory with the read-installed module. Once we gathered a list of modules we walk through them and look at all of their package.json's, We try to identify the license with the spdx module to see if it has a valid SPDX license attached. If that fails, we then look into the module for the following files: LICENSE, LICENCE, COPYING, & README.
If one of the those files are found (in that order) we will attempt to parse the license data from it with a list of known license texts. This will be shown with the * next to the name of the license to show that we "guessed" at it.
4 Oct 12, 2022
953 Dec 25, 2022
180 Dec 18, 2022
4 Jul 10, 2021
3 Sep 27, 2022
23 Feb 8, 2022
5 Apr 26, 2022
8 Mar 24, 2022
234 Jan 1, 2023
36 Dec 21, 2022
6 Aug 7, 2022
2 Mar 29, 2022
3 Jul 5, 2022
7 Sep 22, 2022
7 Jul 30, 2022